


The Time Will Come

by Amy R (Brightknightie)



Category: Forever Knight
Genre: 21st Century, Business, Characters Playing Pokemon GO, Gen, Refugees, ennui
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-28
Updated: 2016-09-28
Packaged: 2018-08-17 04:42:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,513
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8130841
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Brightknightie/pseuds/Amy%20R
Summary: Twenty years after canon, Janette runs a company in which the Enforcers are a little too interested. Aristotle brings a proposition that could change everything.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Merfilly](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Merfilly/gifts).



_Summer 2016_  
_Vancouver, British Columbia_

“Alma!” Janette snapped. “I thought I said that I didn’t want to hear of any more pokémon caught in this office.”

“I’m not catching any,” Alma pouted. “That’s the problem.” The blonde dropped her phone next to her laptop and swung her legs up onto the couch left by the tech start-up that had previously occupied this floor. In jeans and a knit top, Alma looked like a techie herself, Janette thought. Time was, professionals had dressed professionally, and you could tell the adults from the children... Alma continued, “The catch rates sank like a stone with the latest update. Anyway, I turned off the sound effects, so you can’t hear, just like you said.”

Janette rested her elbows on her desk and rubbed her temples. Vampires didn’t get headaches, she reminded herself. “Perhaps it is your skill that has sunk.”

“No, the circle colors show the odds—” Alma reached for her phone.

Janette cleared her throat. “How are the kiosk designs coming?”

“I emailed you the North America plans.”

“And the Tokyo and Hong Kong plans?”

“They’re with the localization consultants—” Alma sighed and unlocked her laptop. “Yeah, yeah, I’ll follow up.”

Janette returned her eyes to her screen and its bottomless inbox. Lately, she spent most nights answering emails and instant messages — it seemed that no one but she used phones as phones anymore (Alma had boggled, “Why are you calling my pokémon machine?”) — not to mention attending conventions and meetings. Oh, the meetings! She should drain the next pest to add one to her calendar. Janette too often started getting real work done only after the sun rose, when most of her suppliers, clients, employees, and — well, call them “regulators” — went to sleep.

Her endless parade of nights had somehow become both hectic and tiresome. However had she allowed this?

Leaning back in her desk chair, Janette stared through the night-mirrored windows of her corner office, past the sparkling city lights, toward her operations hub at Vancouver International Airport. She remembered when she’d first had the idea for Nocturne Enterprises. She’d felt enthusiastic, energized… and not a little vengeful. Her first attempt to fly by airline after 9/11 had been a nightmare of deprivation, temptation, and closed circuit cameras. With the then-new restrictions on liquids, there had been no way to carry in bottled blood. (Never mind carrying out exsanguinated corpses.) So Janette had invented ways. She had bent their systems, kept her secrets, and, eventually, monetized her expertise. Denizens of the night needed more than just pre-clearance; she provided. The Enforcers had been dubious. Then, they had turned all too eager…

Janette shuddered.

Focusing on her reflection in the window, she adjusted the cuffs of her tailored, jacquard-red blouse, appraised her sleek, brunette updo, and fingered the strand of black pearls around her neck. Was this still how a rising young executive would dress? Convenient as it was to her self-presentation that vampires did show in mirrors, Nocturne thrived primarily because they less conveniently also showed on film— and digital, Janette reminded herself.

Why was it so hard to keep up with this century? When had the contents of dusty attics come to feel a better fit in her hands than the bleeding edge of innovation? She’d never before had to struggle so to embrace the right fads and fashions, to enjoy what she wanted to seem. Was this how Erica had… no. Janette refused the thought.

She blamed Nicolas.

Behind her reflection in the window’s double-layered panorama, a familiar face appeared. Janette swallowed. “Alma, why don’t you work at your own desk?”

“Because I don’t like—”

“Now,” Janette ordered.

Alma looked up. Her eyes widened. She scooped her belongings together — and slipped on her shoes, which evidently she’d removed.

Janette felt that impossible headache suggest itself again.

Looking more than ever like an absent-minded scholar, though now with an electronic tablet, rather than one of paper or slate, Aristotle nodded kindly to Alma as she scurried past. Her answering smile was nervous, not the lascivious one she customarily bestowed on men who seemed as unimposing as he did, with whom she liked to play. Alma disappeared into the warren of cubicles; Aristotle closed the door behind her with a sigh.

Janette set her hands on her armrests. “What do the Enforcers want now?”

Aristotle lowered himself into one of the chairs facing Janette’s desk. “Speaking as the last previous fool to create a service that the Enforcers decided they couldn’t do without,” he pushed his glasses up his nose, “you’re going to have to decide whether you can endure being at their beck and call. If so, the sooner you resign yourself to them, the better.”

“I had enough of that from—” Janette pursed her lips. “From family.”

“That’s what I thought.” Aristotle inclined his balding head. “I hope they’re both well?”

“Lacroix is enjoying Brazil, I believe.”

“He went for the Olympics?”

“Of course.”

“And Nick?”

“Well,” Janette shrugged, “you know how Nicolas feels about politics.”

“Ah! Yes.” Aristotle raised his eyebrows. “The year of Brexit, burkinis, and Trump. I wonder where Nick’s found to hide from it all?”

“What do the Enforcers want, Aristotle?” Janette repeated, leaning forward. “They cannot expect miracles every time they brandish their overgrown fangs.”

“They do expect that,” Aristotle chuckled, “but that’s beside the point. You’re right; I didn’t come to gossip.” He powered on his tablet, and tapped and swiped its screen. “You know that the Canadian government resettled 25,000 Syrian refugees between last November and this March, and then committed to another 10,000 by early next year.”

Janette nodded. She might prefer to feign ignorance, but Nocturne’s success demanded her open familiarity with such developments. Running the Raven, not so long ago — yet such a lifetime gone — had required similar savvy with dissimilar subjects.

“And of course you know that many community groups are sponsoring refugees, helping them settle in, find jobs, learn English or French. There’s a small government stipend to start, but community volunteers and organizers are the key.”

“Yes?” Janette prompted. She wondered whether the Enforcers had decided that desperate Syrian civilians fleeing bombs, torture, and starvation were somehow a threat to the vampires’ secret, or approved prey, or designated camouflage... “Out with it.”

Aristotle set his tablet on her desk. Janette saw the passport photo of a young woman with intelligent eyes and a slight frown, wearing a saffron headscarf and fawn-brown leather jacket. Aristotle cleared his throat. “How would you like to sponsor her?”

Janette blinked. “Don’t be absurd.”

“Her name is Tasnim Saadeh,” Aristotle said. “University student. Citizen journalist.”

“Blogger,” Janette translated coldly. “YouTuber?” She wasn’t really that out of touch; she was just finding it hard to enjoy being in touch. Her situation was nothing like Erica’s. Nothing.

Aristotle waved that away. “Ms. Saadeh is originally from Aleppo. She fled Darayya after the massacre. She’s been working her way toward safety ever since.”

“That’s none of my business,” Janette glared at Aristotle. He had to have guessed that the mention of what happened at Darayya would rake up buried associations. She had seen the French occupation at the start of the last century. Perhaps even Lacroix had his limits as an individual, though she knew better than to bank on it, but those _en masse_ engaged in civil wars... Janette braced to thrust away her past.

The memories were too many. Too old, too new, generation after generation. They piled over her defenses. The smells of woodsmoke and rot, always. Later, the smell of gunpowder crept in. Later yet, gasoline. The predictable, drifting, unimaginable descent of a siege. The way that, first, the beautiful people stop coming, and then, before you know it, there’s no more food for the mortals, and then, in a blink, a vampire finds herself ripping open corpses stacked on the frozen mud for just a drop, any drop, the hunger licking for life in the muck of death.

Perhaps because she’d so often witnessed from behind and beneath — the woman’s place, the civilian’s, the peasant’s — Janette had rarely understood what Nicolas and Lacroix saw in war. At least Nicolas had seemed to grow out of it at last.

“No.” Janette stood. She pushed away Aristotle’s tablet. “Impossible! I am not a babysitter for misplaced mortals.”

“She’s a vampire.”

“Even more absurd, then!” Janette threw up her arms. “I can’t count the number of times I’ve been overtaken by an army, with and without Nicolas and Lacroix. I survived. So has she, evidently. Vampires move on and begin again. It’s what we do. It’s what we are. _You_ give her a new identity, and _finis_! Bah!”

Aristotle was silent.

Janette turned her back on him. Looking at and through the mirrored window, two realities in one plane, she crossed her arms. She had scoffed that she could be mistaken for the mothering type. She had disguised and denied her efforts on behalf of her strays, mortal and immortal. Yet still people rushed to misunderstand. It was bad enough that Nicolas and Miklos had long believed that they saw more than she wished to show. It was worse that she had once admitted as much to Lacroix. That even Aristotle felt free to pull this thread unsettled her.

Finally, Janette asked, “What is she to the Enforcers?”

Aristotle picked up his tablet and contemplated the photo. “The last time I was in Syria, Aleppo was the third largest city in the Ottoman Empire. I remember the souk, the covered bazaar remodeled by that Grand Vizier — what was his name? — and the hidden courtyards blooming with jasmine. Everything else was sand and stone, but those tubs of jasmine smelled like life...”

Janette swallowed her irritation. She spoke softly. “Any routine Nocturne package can fly her in without exposure. The Enforcers wouldn’t have sent you for that.”

“They didn’t send me.”

Janette met his eyes in the reflection. She turned around.

Aristotle swiped the passport photo aside on his tablet, revealing another image of the same woman, younger yet, smiling, in the sun. “She wasn’t a vampire before the massacre. She was by the time she got into the UNHCR resettlement system. Vampires aren’t supposed to _get_ into that system.” He pushed up his glasses again. “The Enforcers don’t know how she did it. They don’t like not knowing.”

“So ask her.”

“I flew to Turkey on one of your Nocturne packages — very nice, by the way! Couldn’t have been smoother! — to offer her another identity in exchange for intel.” Aristotle looked bleak. “She can’t disappear from the system now without raising flags. It would be too many questions without answers for the mortal authorities. She’s safe until she gets here.”

Lifetimes with Lacroix and Nicolas had ingrained prudent suppression of curiosity. But Janette couldn’t resist asking, “What happens when she gets here?”

“As seen by the mortal authorities?” Aristotle’s eyebrows rose. “An accident, probably. Maybe a murder, a hate crime — whatever excuse removes her with the least notice.”

Janette felt her eyes widen. “You want me to protect her from the Enforcers. Is that what this is?” She raised her hands in exasperation. “Are you mad? If you want a hero, go find Nicolas! No.”

“She broke through the Enforcers’ arrangements, Janette. You and me and Larry Merlin — we _are_ those arrangements. Don’t you want to know how she did it?”

“Not at the cost of a quick trip into the sunlight!” Janette strode to her office door. “They haven’t driven me that far.” Not even if thoughts of Erica’s end kept… no. No, no, no.

Aristotle looked around the office. He pushed his glasses up his nose again and focused on her. “How long until they do drive you past where you want to be?”

Pointedly, Janette opened her door.

Aristotle sighed and picked up his tablet.

When they reached the elevator, Janette pressed the button. Aristotle said, “For what it’s worth, Ms. Saadeh is alone. She clearly doesn’t regret the prompt, uh, passing of whoever brought her across, but she wouldn’t tell me—”

“Because telling you is telling the Enforcers?”

Aristotle raised his chin. “You asked what Ms. Saadeh is to them. Just a loose end, an anomaly.” He stepped into the elevator. Briefly, his eyes smoldered with the grim force of all his centuries as a vampire. “You didn’t ask who she can be to us.”

The door closed between them.

Janette turned back toward her office. But she found herself wandering the long way around the perimeter of the floor, away from anyone who might grab her for a hallway conference or quickie sign-off. Nocturne was her pride and her prison. The Enforcers’ need for the service granted her some immunity, yes, but surely not enough for what Aristotle was suggesting. Surely not. Covert resistance? Open revolution?

Revenge?

The last thing she needed at this time was an ignorant convert under her wing, in her business. Yet Janette felt as full of energy as if she’d just hunted and fed her fill.

Good for her, this Tasnim! Janette thought. It would not be an easy existence as a masterless convert, a young woman now never to grow old, an escapee from one set of mortal traumas suddenly plunged into the inescapable, immortal night. Janette understood. Tasnim had chosen to live; she’d taken her revenge; and she was free.

For now.

Could she free the rest of them? How long, how deep, had Aristotle been planning? Where did Merlin stand?

Janette had rarely been a rebel. Among the children of Lacroix, that had ever been Nicolas’s role. Janette had chosen security over liberty, survival over autonomy, for a thousand years. Through Nicolas’s blood, she had long tasted the sweet tang of his hope of freedom, but the fruits of its pursuit had too often soured in him.

Now, suddenly, she found the hope of freedom heady with life in herself. Each moment was again urgent and distinct. The stopped pendulum swung once more.

Had this always lurked in her blood, too? Or had she inherited it — contracted it — from Nicolas when he brought her back across?

Perhaps Nicolas had been right. With this, possibly, he might have saved Erica, after all. Or not. It might be that it reignited a flame only when it flared up inside, not out. Let the dead bury their dead. What mattered were those who wanted to live.

Janette arrived behind Alma’s desk. Peering over her employee’s shoulder, she asked, “What’s that one?”

“Dratini! I need a hundred—” Alma looked up from the game on her phone. “The volume is off. I pinged you about Tokyo; you haven’t answered yet.”

The impossible headache didn’t even try to trifle with her this time. Janette sat on the edge of Alma’s desk. “Nocturne is going to sponsor a refugee. I need you to pull up everything you can find, in English, French, and Arabic, by and about a certain Tasnim Saadeh.”

“Why me?”

“Because we’re all in together.” Janette smiled. “Or we soon will be.”

 

**— end —**

**Author's Note:**

> **Disclaimer.** This is fanfiction of _Forever Knight_. Please don’t mistake it for anything else. (Refugees exist. Vampires don’t.)
> 
> **Beta-reading.** Thank you, Batdina, for catching typos and sharing encouragement! Thank you very much!
> 
> **Inspiration.** In the 2016 FKFicFest game, Merfilly requested a gen Janette story, and quoted: “ _The flower that blooms in adversity is the rarest and most beautiful of all._ ” That led to this story via pondering adversity in Janette’s life, and the character’s possible preference for even adversity over boredom… to a point.
> 
> **Works consulted.** I read many newspaper articles about the admirable Canadian efforts to take in Syrian refugees, including the feature “A Canadian Welcome for Syrian Refugees” (July 2016, New York Times), and listened to several podcasts, including the documentary “Hotel Limbo” (May 2016, _The Doc Project_ , CBC). I also read the book _The Morning They Came for Us: Dispatches from Syria_ by Janine Di Giovanni (2016, Liveright Publishing), from which I borrowed the phrase “the beautiful people stop coming” for Janette’s use here.
> 
> **Canon.** Aristotle is from “Forward into the Past,” and Larry Merlin from “Hunters.” Miklos appears in “A Fate Worse than Death,” “Forward into the Past,” and “Bad Blood,” and is referenced by name in “Curiouser  & Curiouser.” Alma appears in “For I Have Sinned,” and is named as Janette’s decorator in “Love You to Death” (Janette’s decorator is referenced unnamed in “Last Act”). Erica is the playwright in “Last Act,” a vampire friend of Nick and Janette who, feeling out of step with the world, commits suicide; the story title quotes one of her lines. The Enforcers, “those who protect [the vampires’] secret,” appear in “Unreality TV,” are referenced by name in “Forward into the Past” and “Black Buddha, Part Two,” and are alluded to by their function in “The Fix.” Nick’s feelings about politics are most directly witnessed in “Spin Doctor,” “Beyond the Law,” and “Queen of Harps.” Janette’s feelings about revenge and captivity are most explicit in “A Fate Worse Than Death.”
> 
> **Thank you for reading!** Please let me know what you think, and how I can do better next time.


End file.
